Australian Airline REFUSES Woman To Board A Flight

Australia’s budget airline TigerAir won’t apologise for refusing to allow a distressed woman who was rushing to see her sister who was in a hospital, just three minutes after check-in had closed.

The Melbourne woman booked a flight straight after learning her sister had been hit by a truck in Sydney and might have her legs amputated.

After being unable to check-in for her flight, Lenny was told TigerAir would not allow her onto the flight, even though it was not taking off for 42 minutes.

“I could barely speak because I was crying so much, but all the [Tiger employee] said was: ‘Do you want to pay $92 for the next flight?’,” Lenny told The New Daily.

A spokesperson for the airline said that their policy was not flexible: “We aim to be efficient and cut complexity in the right areas to pass on the most competitive fares to our customers,” they said.

Lenny told the website that she had become very stressed by the whole experience as “The website wouldn’t let me to check-in online, so I had called Tiger on the way, and they said I would have to do check-in when I got there,” she said.

Lenny was told she was three minutes too late, and the system had locked her out.

“I was getting more and more upset and worrying about what was happening in Sydney,” said Lenny, who only knew that her sister had gone into emergency surgery.

“I said my sister had been in an accident, and I was trying to get to Sydney, but [the employee] wouldn’t even acknowledge what I was saying.”

“She just kept asking if I wanted to get on a later flight.”

Lenny paid the extra $92 fee, but once she had passed security, her first flight had still not boarded at all.

TigerAir has not apologised for the incident saying "Our check-in desks close strictly 45 minutes before departure.

“We encourage customers to aim to arrive 90 minutes before their flight to provide ample time to check-in and to allow for unforeseen delays on the journey to the airport.”